Portrait #5 2022

Adam Caldwell’s *Portrait #5* is an intimate painting of a woman’s face, rendered in oil on what appears to be a canvas. The peach and blue tones give it this kind of wistful, dream-like feel, right? I imagine Caldwell layering thin washes of paint, building up the form gradually. Notice how the paint is almost translucent in places, allowing the texture of the canvas to peek through. I’m also really drawn to the collage element that bisects her face. It's like a diagram of her head or something. The way it obscures and reveals reminds me of how memory functions, fragmented and incomplete. There’s something so vulnerable and exposed about the way she’s rendered. Caldwell, like other figurative painters, explores the human condition through the act of portraiture. And by incorporating collage, he blurs the lines between representation and abstraction. It's a way of seeing, thinking, and feeling through paint, which continues to evolve across generations.